Yesterday morning I woke up early to speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. It was my first time there, and it’s an exceptional group. Then, after some meetings, I spoke in the afternoon at Hubspot’s Inbound conference (thankfully just across a long skybridge that connects Boston’s World Trade Center from its Convention Center). This morning, I woke up even earlier and caught a plane to Denver, where I presented on a panel with Moz’s investor, Brad Feld as well as Ben Huh of Cheezburger and Bart Lorang of FullContact at Denver’s Startup Week. Tomorrow, I’ll be reprising my role of organizer for Foundry’s CEO Summit (despite no longer being CEO).

Right now, I’m supposed to be at a dinner for Denver Startup week, but I’m all people’d out. I need to be an introvert. And I need to get back to blogging. And I really need to tell this story.

These past few days, I’ve met dozens of new people and talked to lots of old friends and colleagues, too. The exchanges always start the same: “How are you doing?” I get a pang of dread every time I hear it.

Yesterday, a Mozzer shared this video with the company over an allstaff thread. I started watching, as I usually do, thinking that 1-2 minutes into the video I’d give up and get back to my email. Wrong. For 19 minutes and 5 seconds, I was captivated. The video isn’t lovely or beautifully done, but it is fascinating, and it told a story with which I was unfamiliar (about a game designer named Phil Fish) with lessons remarkably applicable to the world of marketing.

If you’re A) in marketing, B) curious about the nature of fame, and/or C) fascinated how the web amplifies and changes human behavior, you should watch it.

The Loop starts out with something small. I’ll be lying awake, in bed, trying to fall asleep, and thinking (as I do most of the time) about work. Some little tweak to a product I want to make will lead to a bigger challenge about resourcing which leads me back to the decisions of the past, which fills me with disappointment and frustration, which leads to pessimism about the future, which eventually leads to feelings of fear and powerlessness. It’s impossible to fall asleep when those emotions are coursing through me.

Tonight, I’m up late, like I am almost every night. I wanted to write a different post – to put up a “big content” piece I worked on over the weekend while my wife was visiting family in California, but I got too behind on email and other obligations and so it will have to wait. But I couldn’t help catching my friend Dan Shapiro‘s tweet:

I’ve been trying something new at Moz. I schedule 90 minutes every week or two for “office hours,” and invite anyone from any team at the company to come visit and chat about whatever’s on their mind. So far, attendance has been sparse (only 1 person the first week, ~10 the 2nd week, and 4 each of the last two weeks), but I think that’s a good thing. Hopefully it means that the other channels of communication and feedback are supporting most Mozzers’ needs.

Today, one of our senior engineers, Brandon, stopped by. He was worried about a growing sense of entitlement on the team. About 9 months ago, we talked about the risk of hedonic adaptation at an all-hands gathering, but this engineer felt that those risks were becoming reality. Brandon pointed out some feedback from TinyPulse (a tool we use to gather and report anonymous feedback at Moz) and some of the things he’d personally overheard when socializing around the company. These included complaints about the increased hours and stress associated with our recent launch/rebrand, a lack of availability of particular kinds of food and snacks, challenges with scheduling vacation time, some folks not getting the kinds of hardware/furniture they wanted, and about there not being enough open timeslots when we had a masseuse visit the office.

the hedonic treadmill: an unavoidable result of evolutionary biology

This is a really tough topic for me, because I deeply believe in empathy and generosity (two important elements of TAGFEE), and asking people to just deal with long hours, high stress, a lack of their favorite foods/snacks/hardware, or not getting a massage when others did seems, on the surface at least, to conflict with those values.

I know that I am among the luckiest, most blessed human beings to have ever existed on the planet since the dawn of time. I’m not in the 1% or the 0.1%, I’m in the 0.0000000000-well-you-get-the-point-001. That’s not exclusively because of finances (no debt and $26,961.98 in the bank as of tonight) or the era and country into which I was born (though those are huge contributors), but because of how I experience the world.

In my adult life, I haven’t done what I’ve heard so many people describe as “enduring” their lives/jobs/family/friends/situation. To me, the days seem to have very little monotony and an abundance of opportunities to be challenged, to learn, to help others, and to be filled with joy.

Some of that, undoubtedly, is the incredibly lucky situation I’ve come to be in since dropping out of college, digging a struggling consulting business into and then out of debt, and being made CEO of an exciting startup. And a lot of it, assuredly, is the presence of amazing people in my life – the 130 coworkers whose company I like a weird amount given how much time we all get together, and my wife Geraldine (whose blog is basically a testament to these last 3 paragraphs).

But some of it, too, is outlook and perception. It’s how I reflect on what goes on around me in the times when others might experience tedium or frustration or anger. I do get stressed, and I do feel those negative emotions, but if other people’s descriptions are any guide, for me, they’re dulled, like a shrill scream that’s almost too far away to hear.

For the first 6 years of my career, I made less than $20,000/year. For 18 months, I made more, but then I made less for another year after that, so it averaged out. It was a tough time (and I’ve written about it before so won’t rehash here), but I never stopped learning, stopped growing, or had to feeling like I was on a treadmill going nowhere. It always FELT like a notch of progress was just around the corner (and eventually, it was).

Many folks ask me “what kept you going all those years?” Undoubtedly, there were a number of factors, but I strongly believe that the sense that progress was being made, even when the rewards of that progress were so intangible and non-financial, was a heavy contributor. Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality – both of which I enjoyed, did a TEDx talk last year that was just posted this week on the topic of work and meaning:

Erica and I are sitting on a small bus with 8 other fellow Mozcationers, in transit from Cape Town to a kloof on the Northeastern side of the Cedarburg Mountains. It’s 90°+ outside, and the air conditioning in the bus can’t keep up. It’s a little too uncomfortable to read, and while the scenery is amazing, so is the company. We strike up a conversation about books that moves into comics, games, and random geeky hobbies of all sorts. As the conversation winds down and we turn back to look out the windows, I think for a minute, then tell Erica how amazed and impressed I am at both her passion for these pursuits as well as her complete lack of self-consciousness about them. She doesn’t bat an eyelash about explaining the plot of a super-niche science fiction comic. I’m amazed. And I’m jealous.

I’ve always been ashamed of the enjoyment I get from geekier pursuits. I try to hide the fact that I worked as Wizards of the Coast in college, that I tried to play role playing games in middle school (but couldn’t find anyone to play with me, except my little sister, who was too young at the time to really understand), that I still love computer games (though I almost never play them). It’s so bad that I still feel anxiety, get sweaty, and feel my pulse pound if I’m playing a game on the weekend and Geraldine comes back from a shopping trip. Honestly, what the @#%! does it matter if I play a computer game in my spare time? No one cares.

I’m just afraid they will.

Figuring out why is a quest I’ve been on lately, and it’s one that’s taking much longer and proving vastly more mysterious than I ever suspected.

Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding.

I recently encountered an example of this in some advice related to the SEO field, and how to optimize for rankings. That advice referenced SEOmoz’s own Google Ranking Factors article, which uses a pie-shaped diagram to illustrate “percents” of particular algorithmic factors (like the illustration on the left in the image below).

This visualization, and the conceptual takeaway that the ranking algorithm is a pie chart made up of buckets that can only be filled so much, got me worried that a series of assumptions might lead a lot of folks astray.